The United Kingdom is on the cusp of an energy crisis. A recent study by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) claimed that increasing usage, the loss of coal and the closure of nuclear power stations could lead electricity demand to exceed supply by 40–55 percent by 2025.
Hopes have been pinned on the power of renewable energy to address the gap, but without dramatically improved storage options, it will remain incapable of supporting the maximum levels of demand.
Powervault offers a solution. The intelligent home battery is designed to automatically store solar and off-peak grid electricity, ready to be unleashed whenever it’s needed.
The powerplay
Powervault CEO Joe Warren first encountered the challenges of energy consumption at the beginning his career in the internet sector in the 1990s, where he had to ensure there was enough electricity to keep tens of thousands of computers running. Warren has been working in what he calls the “smart grid sector” for about ten years, investigating new ways of managing electricity on the network.
“About five years ago I realised that we were deploying so much wind and solar energy that we really needed to find some way of storing it so we could use it when we needed it,” he says.
“That’s because a lot of wind energy and a certain amount of solar energy effectively ends up being wasted because it’s not needed at the time it’s generated.”
He discovered that storage system at Powervault in 2014. The company developed a consumer battery device and appliance for homeowners that stores low-cost solar electricity without having to buy it from the centralised grid. Later that year, Powervault launched the first plug-and-play energy storage device.
Inside the Powervault cube are a collection of power electronics to make the energy usable, a monitoring system to check energy is being generated or consumed, control electronics that determine when to charge or discharge, and batteries to power it.
“If you’re generating electricity and that’s going back onto the grid, it charges up the batteries,” says Warren. “And conversely, if you’re consuming electricity then it will discharge the batteries to reduce your electricity bill.
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